ICE’s Shock Glove Contract Reveals a Deeper Oversight Problem
Watch the promotional videos and you’ll see grown men, trained police officers, scream and crumple to the ground. That is the sales pitch. The product is a glove that delivers an electric shock on contact with human skin, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants thousands of them. According to a Department of Homeland Security notice published Monday, ICE plans to spend between $10 million and $20 million on the devices, with a contract that could be posted as early as today.. And here is the detail that has become all too familiar, the ‘deal’ involves a contract awarded without competitive bidding.
The device is called the G.L.O.V.E., short for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, made by Compliant Technologies of Lexington, Kentucky. It works like a taser without the prongs. An officer presses a button at the wrist, touches your skin, and you experience what one former New York police official who volunteered for a demonstration described as enough pain to buckle the knees of a man standing 6’3″.
The honest assessment of the G.L.O.V.E., according to Kenneth Corey, who spent over three decades with the NYPD and now leads the Policing Leadership Academy at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, is not the glove itself. Use of electrically-charged gloves may beat a baton or a bullet when someone charges an officer with a knife. What matters, he says, is strong policy, training, and accountability.
He is right. And that is exactly why this purchase should worry us. ICE has hired more than 12,000 new officers in under a year, per NPR reporting, a hiring surge so fast that policing experts have questioned the vetting behind it. A report released in July by the ACLU examined more than 1,200 immigration enforcement incidents and documented agents pushing, tackling, or pinning people to the ground more than 400 times, and using weapons including chemical irritants, rubber bullets, and tasers about as often. Last month alone, according to CBS News, ICE agents fatally shot two immigrants during attempted vehicle stops in Maine and Texas. In both cases, the agents were not wearing body cameras.
So the question is not whether a shock glove can ever be justified. The question is whether we trust this agency, at this moment, with a pain device that activates at the push of a button nobody nearby can see. Even the manufacturer warns the glove should never be used as punishment, never on someone who is merely mouthing off, and never on children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people. Those warnings assume restraint. The record suggests otherwise.
There is a bigger picture here, too. These gloves are already in more than 50 police departments across roughly 20 states, plus prisons, hospitals, and at least one public school district, in Omaha, according to purchase records reviewed by NPR. Pain compliance technology is quietly becoming normal in America, and a federal purchase this size, likely the company’s largest ever according to one researcher who tracks the device, will accelerate that.
All of this is happening while the White House pressures ICE to arrest 2,000 people a day, per CBS News. Quotas plus new weapons plus thin oversight is a formula we can do the math on ourselves.
Congress controls this money. Our representatives can demand public use policies, mandatory body cameras during every deployment, and full reporting before a single glove ships. Because a government that buys pain wholesale should at least have to explain itself to us, retail. Go beyond the headlines…
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